


Good, or Don't Be.

by nothingbutfic



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 06:16:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5037085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingbutfic/pseuds/nothingbutfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four times Shinji Ikari met Kaworu Nagisa, and one he did not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good, or Don't Be.

∞+3:  
  
Shinji stares at the hospital trolley. It’s all too much. The robot. Captain Katsuragi. His father. The blonde doctor in the white coat. They all ask too much of him; but then, from he who has never asked anything of himself, one single act of volition would be more than he ever dreamed capable of.  
  
The young boy stretched out on the trolley like a sack of flesh and bones stirs, pushing against the restraints and the tubes and the wires that seem to hold him together and cage him at the same time. Shinji can see the strain in his face, the sheen on his brow. He flexes against the cloth of his binding, and there is strength there still.  
  
For a moment, Shinji is in awe of such strength, before that awe is swept away: he knows he can never be so strong. He knows, too, that such strength must be guarded, conserved: and so he volunteers for he knows not what in the ignorant belief that they would not send him out to die, and that even he could not allow that boy to suffer more.  
  
“Who was that?” he asks, drowsy, when he wakes up hours later in hospital, and is shunted through exam room after exam room before they certify he has no memory of his own victory. “The boy.”  
  
Captain Katsuragi looks at him, clad again in white shirt and black trousers, and buzzes open the door that leads into yet another part of NERV, full and brittle with knowledge that he does not possess. “That’s the pilot of Unit 00,” she says, quietly, and ruefully as well. “Kaworu Nagisa.”  
  
*  
  
∞+2:  
  
Shinji runs, and loses himself in the running. Too many harsh words have been spoken for him to go back now, and if he runs – and runs – and keeps on running, then it becomes not a question of their rejection, but his choice. This way he never has to ask for forgiveness; this way he never has to find himself unworthy of absolution. He carries little with him besides a small rucksack, and his NERV bankcard is good for all credit.  
  
He takes the train, and doesn’t know where he’s going. He sleeps up back of the cinema in a strange city, and ignores both the city and the strangeness. He takes another train, and a bus, and he walks. He shifts from city to town, changing transport, and criss-crosses Japan in a week. A week turns to two, and if Captain Katsuragi has not caught up with him yet, that is fine with him: he has not caught up with himself.  
  
By the third week, he finds the seashore. This is a sleepy hamlet, and he wanders down the main road, idly glancing from left to right. The houses are old, and picturesque for all that they are shabby. A few faces glance at him as he walks by, and although they offer respectful nods, no-one approaches him for conversation. The road ends up dust at the beach, and Shinji gazes out at the wide pure blue of the ocean. He wonders what would happen if he just walked under the waves and never came back up.  
  
Humming disturbs his reverie, and Shinji shakes off the black thoughts to glance at a young man, dressed much the same as he who sits on an outcropping of rock, one leg dangling over the side. The soft evening sun makes a halo of his startlingly grey hair, and Shinji finds that red eyes regard him warmly. The humming stops, yet the boy shows no shame for having disregarded the sort of social niceties that Shinji has policed himself with his whole life.  
  
“Music brings us joy,” the boy says, with a lilt. “Or at least, the capacity for joy, although it is up to the human heart as to whether we open ourselves to such potential or remain closed in solitude.”  
  
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Shinji says awkwardly, because they haven’t even been introduced.  
  
“That there is also joy in the world,” the boy tells him, and looks back out at the sea. “You have a place you do not wish to be,” he observes, after a pause that Shinji doesn’t know how to break.  
  
At his words, Shinji finds anger glances through his body, making his fists clench. “I don’t – they make me do things there that I don’t want to do!”  
  
He is regarded calmly and warmly by red eyes, and that level-headedness saps some of his anger. “Can you find no joy in what you do there?”  
  
“They make me fight,” Shinji grumbles. “I don’t like fighting. There’s too many chances.”  
  
“And yet man fights to live, and in the living, he can find joy. The options allowed to us by existence promises many possibilities, and although there is some uncertainty in which will eventually see the light of day, the possibilities are far more desirable than the certainty of death, are they not?”  
  
Shinji swallows, but does not answer.  
  
The boy clambers off his rock with a light skip to his step, certain that no matter how he moves he’ll be alright. He jumps – and lands – on the sand with the same casual grace, and then makes his way up over the small crest of land to where Shinji stands, hair waving a little in the wind, those blood red eyes making Shinji the focus of his regard.  
  
The boy stands close to Shinji, close and warm, and reaches out with a pale, long-fingered hand to brush his knuckles over Shinji’s cheek.  
  
“I think you should go home, and find joy in the living,” he says, a little husky, a little low.  
  
Shinji takes a wide-eyed step backwards, and leaves as fast as he can.  
  
*  
  
∞+1:  
  
Shinji is quiet. Shinji is shy. Shinji keeps to himself and is left to himself. He does his best to make no trouble for anyone, and so no trouble comes to him. He lives, on his own, in a small apartment that his father pays for and never visits, and he likes it that way. His father has no use for him now, not since he refused to pilot the Evangelion. He strolls to school by his own, lost in the sound of his tape player, and walks home the same way. No friends cluster around him, and he does not buy a cell phone because no-one wants to ring him. In class he sits by himself, up the front (but not too far) and to the side, gazing out the window at a world he’s too apathetic to explore, and does not see it.  
  
The other students do not bother him; not Suzahara, not Aida, not even Ayanami who looks at him once because she knows him, and then turns away before his cheeks have time to burn with embarrassment. He lives an undisturbed life; a normal boy in a class of extraordinary children, and does not know it. One thing, perhaps, perplexes him, but then the incident is gone like a pebble dropped into a lake and he chooses not to give it credence. There is one girl who defies and defiles him, one girl who disturbs him. She is new, she is foreign and she has red hair and blue eyes, both of which demand attention she is all too willing to bask in. What she cannot charm, she bowls over, and she hands out derision and affirmation in equal measure, and treats the girls far better than she does the boys as she wades her way through the class during her first lunch.  
  
“I’m Shinji Ikari,” Shinji says politely, with a smile in his voice, and blinks, leaning back in his seat at the fervent glare he gets because of a simple introduction.  
  
“I know who you are, Third Child,” she tells him under her breath like he’s beneath her regard, and turns away from him, another classmate already in her sights. “I know what you’ve given up.”  
  
The words mean nothing to him, and the new girl stays steadfastly away from him so he can’t ask for any explanation. The incident, though shared, was brief enough not to attract any comment, and the new girl soon becomes Asuka as the days tick by. She’s never just Asuka, though; never simply one of the girls, and Shinji watches her dance and dare her way from the student body from the other side of the classroom, wondering why she radiates so much verse just to keep herself at bay. Suzahara and Aida watch her too, as do all the other boys, but for reasons more common. The days pass into weeks, and the school adapts; Asuka is part of the pattern now, and Shinji ignores their meeting as he ignores all things that exist beyond his grasp.  
  
The battles surge on and off; sometimes people die, and always the city is saved. Shinji has an inkling of what is going on, but does not share it, as he has no-one to share it with. Months pass, and another new student arrives. This one is polite, this one is considerate. This one openly questions the usual patterns of behaviour into which the entire class has fallen, and does it with such curiosity that no-one besides Asuka can resent the challenge. Kaworu Nagisa glides through life like it cannot ruffle him, and does not blink when Asuka screeches at the temerity of his questions. “Are you happy?” he asks her, one lunchtime when she is holding court with her friends, and simply acknowledges the answer she gives him.  
  
Shinji watches him walk away from Asuka’s muttered insults like they cannot touch him, and after class that day he waits in the corridor, sitting against the wall for Kaworu to be finished with clean-up duty. The music he listens to walls him away from the world, and Shinji finds himself blinking as two shinky-black school shoes and a pair of troused legs. He removes his earphones, and his gaze creeps up, up, up – to see a soft smile, sharp jaw and grey hair.  
  
“Were you waiting for me?” Kaworu asks, and there’s amusement and the hint of something more in his voice.  
  
Shinji blushes. “Uh, no, I – I – well, not exactly waiting, I guess.”  
  
Some things have happened, and are bound to happen. Some things will happen again.  
  
*  
  
∞+0:  
  
Down by the crater, a boy weeps. His tears run down his cheeks, stain his clothing. In front of him, the wrecked city lies drowned: saved for yet another fight, but still in ruins.  
  
“I thought angels were sent by God,” Shinji chokes out, his face cast down to the rubble and concrete dust, so that for a moment he can hide his grief. “I thought angels were sent by God!” he repeats, tipping his head up to the sky so that even the heavens can ring with his searching, his demand for answers. His arms splay out on either side, and he gazes up – but there are no answers, and the only reply he can hear is the squawk of birds.  
  
“If you’re sent by God, how can you die?” he asks, and crumples back in on himself. “You were supposed to be immortal, Kaworu. Why can’t you come back? What can't you come  _back_!”  
  
A short while later a woman with striking midnight blue hair approaches him, but he shrugs the comforting hand from his back. “Kaworu should have survived!” he yells, refusing to heed her words. “Kaworu should have survived. Not me…” He sniffles again, and runs his nose along the back of his hand.  
  
This is his world, and he has to live in it.  
  
*  
  
Α & Ω:  
  
Shinji slumps onto the ground. Around him, a world waits in silence, covered in crosses. Above, the sky burns. The oceans seethe, made rich with LCL and yet no life comes. No spark springs. Time marches on, but growth is held in abeyance. The hand that softened his anger lies still by her side. The voice that spoke to him with such contemptuous clarity is still.  
  
Shinji does not stir.  
  
“What do you want?” she asks, hauling herself to a sitting position, and he makes himself look at her. He loves her. He hates her. She looks like Asuka, is bandaged like Rei and carries Misato’s cares on his shoulders. She is all three, and is both too much and too little. “What do you want, Shinji? She asks again, with a sultryness that would have done Misato proud. He turns away, eyes squeezing shut. He cannot bear to look at her: she burns him with the knowledge that he used to be a boy, that once this was the breadth and scope of his dreams. The world is barren, now: he has no dreams anymore.  
  
“I don’t want  _you_ ,” he spits, and pushes her questing hand to one side so he can stagger over a small rise, away and free of her. Her movements are easy, almost graceful, but there is not enough soul in her, and too much Rei. He feels she will leech him if she can.  
  
“Do you want me?” a voice asks, and Shinji lifts his chin from his absorption and turns, because the voice is not female. The voice is boyish, gentle, deepening with a hint of flirtation that Shinji would not have recognised when he first heard it. When he turns, he finds Kaworu stands there in her place, and steels his heart against the sight. No bruises. No bandages. Just a boy.  
  
“I want to go home,” Shinji murmurs quietly, curling his hands in the lapel of Kaworu’s shirt collar, and pulls him into a kiss.  
  
From space, Yui watches through Unit-01’s eyes. She will keep drifting; beyond the asteroid belt, beyond the heliopause, and out into the deeps. But still, she shall watch, because she is a God in this form, and Gods can be anywhere. The world transforms around her son; the dead rise from their watery grave of LCL, and the crosses vanish as if they were never there. The world remakes itself, reshapes itself, and is healed by the simple power of the human heart, unfettered.  
  
War still exists, and poverty, and homelessness and strife. But here, there was never any Second Impact. There was never any NERV. There was never any SEELE, and there was no need for Eva, or for children to have done what it was needful for them to have done.  
  
Children are just children, and Yui has to smile at that. She watches as they bundle into class, all hope, all joy. Their teacher, Misato Katsuragi, is a known rebel, but they will deal with that and so will her son: she may be a God, but she is yet a mother still. Misato’s boyfriend, Kaji, works for the government. Ritsuko Akagi leads the computer-tech faculty at Nagano University her mother was once chair at. Gendo Ikari busies himself with bioengineering research and sometimes wonders why his wife died of a heart attack many years ago. He does not visit his son; even in the best of all possible worlds, some things never change.  
  
In Shinji’s class, he has friends: they are strong for him, and he them, although they do not always get along. Toji spends most of his time ogling their sensei; and Kensuke spends most of his time taping Toj’s risqué banter so he can blackmail him later. Both have respectable families; both of their fathers work for the government. Asuka’s father is a diplomat, the German Ambassador to Japan, and she spends most of her time doing as much violence to the two stooges as she can get away with.  
  
All of them have mothers, and their mothers are  _proud_  of them.  
  
Shinji’s two best friends are the leading students in the class. Rei is quiet and restrained, although most students try and get her to smile at least once a week (and behind her back they place bets on who can make her laugh.) Her specialities are the hard sciences; psychics, maths and chemistry are her strengths, and everyone talks about how well she does for herself considering Japan does not always take the best care of its orphans. Kaworu is without a family as well, but as he joyously replies when asked he has made a family here, amongst and of these people. The humanities are his realm of choice; a love of language, philosophy, politics that enables his mind to speak with the wisdom of his heart. Shinji and he are often found together, Shinji stretched out with his head in Kaworu’s lap.  
  
People talk – people always talk – for this is merely a good world, not a perfect one. Asuka usually gives any gossipers a piece of her mind (and then undoes some of the goodwill by making a cutting remark when it’s just the three of them on their way to or from somewhere, but it’s her remark to make and her tongue although sharp is rarely spiteful or cruel.) They laugh, they live, and they enjoy themselves, and if Kaworu and Shinji glance at each other too much to be strictly friends, well, they have a life ahead of them to explore where those glances may take them.  
  
Yui watches, and as the years pass, she watches still. Cocooned inside the immortal frame of Unit 01, she is God, in Her Heaven, and all is right with the world.  
  
*


End file.
